Wine O’Clock

I first heard about qvevri in about 1999. I was sitting next to a (quite attractive) young winemaker at a Jacobs Creek premium wine launch, who had just returned from an educational sojourn in Georgia. All I remember of the story was that he was fairly impressed with the winemaking, but had lived in something…

Although Champagne is one of the most well known wines in the world, visiting the region is not as simple as many would expect, especially if you want to get the best of it. After two visits with plenty of research and aforethought, I’m still learning what it’s all about, and realising I’ve missed some of the…

As an aftermath of International Champagne Day (Oct 24 2014), I’ve decided to share a little of my experience with one of my favourite wines. There are plenty of sites out there that will tell you the difference between a brut and an extra brut, a blanc de blanc and a blanc de noirs, but…

(Apologies to those who believe that God prefers we abstain from wine. That’s not the way I was raised. You might want to skip this post because it’s full of references to booze and what you might consider to be blasphemy.) For me, the act of tasting wine has always been somehow aligned with my…

Way back when I was 19 and Pinot Grigio wasn’t fashionable, a sommelier gave me a taste of some. I (an aspiring sommelier), asked him what it was supposed to taste like. He told me “bananas, and rustic country honey”. It was something cheap but at that stage relatively obscure, from the Friuli region in…

When I first started drinking Pinot Noir in Victoria (about 18 years ago), there were really only two big ones on the market – Coldstream Hills, and Scotchman’s Hill. I learned a very valuable lesson then. Pinot Noir grows better on hills. Eventually, I would get around to discovering Pinot from other parts of the…

I was in the Adelaide Hills in 2013. This exact time last year, in fact. It was supposed to be in the middle of harvest, but it had been such a wonderfully warm vintage, that everything had come off the vines a week early. This meant I was able to try some tank samples of…

I met a lady the other day who really knows her wine. She was complaining that she opened up a bottle of Ruinart Brut Rose the previous weekend, and her plebby friends sculled it back, smacking their lips, and saying, only on the last dregs “mmm, that’s luvly! I could drink a lot of this!”…

There are a couple of ways to make a rosé wine. Firstly, you can add a teeny bit of finished red wine to a finished white wine. This isn’t done much anymore, and is actually breaking the rules in countries like France. The second thing you could do, is to make a red wine, and…